A psychology graduate from CUNY Bernard M. Baruch College in Manhattan earns a median $57,204 in her first year out of school. She paid roughly $3,033 per year in net price to get there.
A psychology graduate from Georgetown University earns $51,959 in her first year. She paid $40,815 per year.
The student who paid thirteen times more for her psychology degree earned $5,000 less in year one.
This is not a cherry-picked comparison. It is a pattern. We analyzed 1,088 psychology BA programs using U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard data, and the results challenge what most students assume when they choose a psychology program.
The range is enormous — and school prestige barely explains it
For mainland U.S. psychology programs, first-year earnings span from $17,708 (Naropa University, Colorado) to $57,204 (CUNY Baruch, New York). That is a $40,000 gap for the same bachelor's degree.
The median across all 1,088 programs is $32,013. The 25th percentile is $28,684; the 75th percentile is $35,086. Most psychology graduates land in a $28K–$35K band one year after graduation, regardless of where they went to school.
Here is what does not explain the variance: whether the school is public or private. Public university psychology graduates earn a median $31,466 at year one. Private nonprofit graduates earn $32,609. A difference of barely $1,100 across 1,000-plus programs.
The premium for choosing a private school — which typically costs tens of thousands of dollars more per year — is essentially zero at the median for psychology.
What actually predicts first-year earnings: where the school is
Look at the top performers by first-year earnings and a geographic pattern emerges immediately:
- CUNY Baruch (New York, NY): $57,204 — net price $3,033/yr
- Tufts University (Medford, MA): $56,504 — net price $39,998/yr
- Columbia University (New York, NY): $53,156 — net price $21,590/yr
- Georgetown University (Washington, DC): $51,959 — net price $40,815/yr
- Bucknell University (Lewisburg, PA): $51,645 — net price $40,766/yr
- Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD): $49,035 — net price $18,809/yr
- Yale University (New Haven, CT): $47,874 — net price $23,777/yr
- Princeton University (Princeton, NJ): $47,050 — net price $6,128/yr
New York metro. Boston metro. Washington, D.C. The pattern is not prestige — it is proximity to dense, high-wage labor markets where psychology graduates get absorbed into finance, management, human resources, and technology companies at higher starting rates than elsewhere in the country.
The CUNY Baruch result is particularly instructive. Baruch is a public commuter school best known for its business college. Its psychology graduates enter a labor market dominated by corporate employers who pay New York wages. The result: higher first-year earnings than any Ivy League program in our dataset.
A note on what this data measures — and what it does not
College Scorecard earnings track completers who are working and not enrolled in further education. Graduate students — those who went on to clinical psychology programs, law school, medical school, or PhD programs — are not counted in these figures.
This matters for how you interpret the numbers. What this data measures is specifically: what psychology BAs who entered the workforce directly (without further graduate enrollment) are earning.
An important implication: the strong first-year showing for CUNY Baruch almost certainly reflects students who went directly into the workforce in New York. The lower showing for some elite schools may partly reflect a higher rate of graduate school enrollment — those students simply are not in the dataset yet.
What the four-year numbers show
By four years after graduation, the picture shifts. Among programs with four-year earnings data, Georgetown leads at $99,007, Columbia follows at $86,946, and Tufts at $79,571. CUNY Baruch, the first-year leader, comes in at $73,007 at four years.
The elite-school premium is real — but it is deferred, and it operates through employer networks and career trajectory rather than raw first-year placement. A Georgetown psychology graduate who went directly into a policy or consulting role may see compounding salary growth that outpaces a Baruch graduate's trajectory after a few years in HR or operations.
It is also worth noting that this data is drawn from Title IV federal aid recipients, which at elite private institutions represents a subset of the full student body — typically students who borrowed federal loans or received Pell grants. The full population of Georgetown psychology graduates may look different from the aid-recipient subset in this data.
How to use this when choosing a program
If you are choosing a psychology program, the question is not simply which school has the best reputation. The relevant questions are:
1. What is your next step after the BA? If you plan to enter the workforce directly — in HR, management, social services, or business — the location of your school and your net price matter more than prestige ranking. A high-quality program in a major metro market at a fraction of the cost is often the better financial decision. See our full rankings at Best Psychology Schools for program-by-program ROI figures.
2. If you plan to apply to graduate school — clinical psychology PhD, counseling master's, law, medicine, or MBA — the College Scorecard data for your program does not capture those outcomes. The traditional factors (research opportunities, academic reputation, GPA/GRE support, faculty connections) carry more weight in that scenario than earnings-at-one-year.
3. What is the actual net price? Two programs with similar earnings outcomes but different net prices have very different debt-adjusted returns. Our psychology rankings score every program on net-price-adjusted ROI, not earnings alone.
The answer to the title question
Psychology is not a uniformly good or bad major. It is a major whose financial outcome depends heavily on two things you can control before you enroll: where you go, and what you plan to do next.
For students who plan to work immediately after graduation, the data suggests choosing the most affordable program in the strongest local job market you can access — which may well be a state school in New York or Boston rather than a prestigious private institution anywhere else.
For students planning graduate study, the direct-employment earnings in our data do not capture your likely financial path. Focus on the factors that affect graduate admissions rather than first-year salary benchmarks.
Either way, our full program rankings give you net-price ROI for every psychology program in the dataset — not just the top twenty.
Data: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, 2026 release. Earnings figures represent median earnings of federal Title IV aid recipients who completed a psychology BA and were not enrolled in further education at the time of measurement. 1-year earnings = earnings approximately one year after program completion; 4-year earnings = approximately four years after completion. Net price figures represent the institution-level average net price for federal aid recipients. See our methodology for full details.